Which Meanings of Basic Words Appear in English Reading Tests With Various Difficulties? - Focusing on Polysemy

Abstract

Basic words appear with extremely high frequency in English texts, and without sufficient understanding of such words, text comprehension is undoubtedly impeded. Past research has regarded the relationship between English texts and vocabulary as important, but their focus has mainly been on lexical coverage, which cannot consider the multiple meanings of a word. Basic words often have several meanings; therefore, analyzing the frequency of appearance of each meaning will add important information to the results of earlier research. The current study used seven grades of the EIKEN test and compared how the frequency of meanings of the 100 highest frequency basic words in these tests differed between the upper and lower grades. The results demonstrated that the target words could be grouped into three categories: (a) words mainly used with a single meaning over all grades; (b) words used with multiple meanings in the upper grades, but with a single meaning in the lower grades; and (c) words used with multiple meanings both in the upper and lower grades. Adding to these findings, some unique tendencies were observed irrespective of grade. The results of this research will be beneficial for further studies on English basic words as well as lexical coverage in English tests.